


Breathing Fast

by quigonejinn



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-20
Updated: 2013-07-20
Packaged: 2017-12-20 20:00:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/891267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quigonejinn/pseuds/quigonejinn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>The conscious mind files Drift-made memories</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Breathing Fast

**Author's Note:**

> From talking to [teensniper](http://teensniper.tumblr.com/) and reading the character dossiers/the Pacific Rim novelization.

1\. 

Raleigh grows up in an embassy family: his father was security, and his mother usually found a job in the passport offices. How else do you think two working-class parents took their kids to Budapest, Cairo, and Rio by the time the oldest was thirteen? Dad left; Ma had three mouths to feed and no job, so she went back to the States and did what she could. Their lives had been precarious before; they became hungry afterwards, and on a press tour stop in Manila, in his dark hotel room, Raleigh jolts awake, breathing fast. 

The conscious mind files Drift-made memories, he knows. Too much neural load, so the old/new experiences are put away and accessible only in REM states. Consequently: curled in a mother’s lap and all the time in the world to fall asleep to a lullaby about going to the festival. Pretty new clothes. A tabby kitten. Being gently bribed with pieces of a sweet rice cake wrapped in leaves in order to hold still to have his hair brushed and a clip put in for — for —

His father putting away a sword with ripples like water in the steel. Yellow light coming through the window and being told that he was loved more than any sword that could ever be made: twenty-year old memories from a past that Mako has largely come to terms with. Raleigh knows that before the kaiju, Mako was the only child of only children, doted on by two separate sets of loving grandparents. At this point, after so many other things, how much does Mako even consciously remember? Even her strongest childhood memories from before the kaiju are fading now that she is coming to middle age. 

Raleigh wakes in the dark, breathing fast, tears on his cheeks. 

2\. 

Mako remembers that at first, Stacker kept her with him by refusing to let anybody take her out of his arms: she responded by screaming whenever someone tried. For the better part of a week, in the chaos of the early post-kaiju scenarios, she went where he did. In the canteen, he fixed her an extra platter. At meetings, she drew quietly, read what Japanese-language materials there were in the room or puzzled at documents in English or German until she got tired, at which point she slipped under the table and slept on his feet so that if he stood up to leave, she would know. Her coat got dirty. 

Eventually, someone remembered that a Shatterdome was not an adequate place for a child and that she might have living relatives — it took them a few days to figure out her name since she refused to speak, and when they did, they carried her off to one of the hospital facilities for displaced children and kept her there, through the screaming, until Stacker came back three days later, having learned enough Japanese in the meantime to tell her, in an abominable accent and practiced phrases, that he was sorry that he had not come earlier. She needed to eat. She should play with the other children. 

Mako remembers setting her lips in a line and staring back at him, flat. 

_Eat_ , he said. _I’ll come back for you._

Mako noticed that he dropped the request for her to play with others, and when she wakes up in a hotel room in Manila, she is breathing fast: Yancy’s profile on the other side of the back seat in the car and a heavy, warm weight against her -- a sleeping younger sister. A pack of cousins every summer. The slow, throbbing joy of the first time she beat someone bigger in a dusty playground fight. The quick rush the first time she punched someone for the very good reason that they were a bully -- plus, her older brother’s stupid goddamn name was usually good for at least a half-dozen fights every time they went to a new school. 

Mako wakes with her hands closed into fists and the taste of blood in the back of her throat. In fact, she half-expects to hear Jazmine bringing Ma to the scene of the crime, and she listens for it, but doesn’t hear anything: just the hum of the mini-fridge and the sound of air-conditioning. The curtains at the window are only halfway drawn, so there is enough light from skyscrapers so that Mako can see a partial reflection of her face in the framed artwork facing the bed. All in all, her room is very quiet. Still. 

She considers it for a moment, then slides out of bed. She picks up the key card she keeps on the bedside table, puts on slippers, and makes her way to the front of the room: the suites are big, but she can navigate by the light from the window. 

Raleigh has the room across the hall. His door is open before she knocks, and in the yellow light of the hallway lights, they look at each other. He is sweating, and her lower lip is bloody from her own teeth. He looks like he has been crying, and when she looks down at her hands, she realizes they’ve closed into fists again, so tight that white shows over her knuckles.

He steps back; she steps through. The door closes behind them.


End file.
